Monday

Start Using the Full Power of HTML

Posted By: Arin Dey - February 03, 2020

It's an exciting time to create web pages with the combined power of HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. But it wasn't always this way. At first it was just HTML. And there wasn't much to it back in 1993. You could create documents with headings, paragraphs, and images. And of course, there were hyperlinks. But that was about it. It didn't even allow for number or bullet lists! Over time, much was added to the language. And with the release of HTML5, there is very little that can't be done in a web page.

Media Elements

The most flashy of the new elements involve media. The video and audio tags make it easy to include video and sound in your pages. Perhaps more exciting is the canvas tag, which allows you to draw right on the page.

Structural Elements

A less flashy but arguably more important new element of HTML5 is its inclusion of semantic tags. These days, it is important for search engines to be able to grok pages. Semantic tags help them do that. There is nav, which tells search engines that the content in that section is for navigation. Similarly, article indicates the meat of the page.

Expand Your Coding

If you are still using the same dozen or so HTML tags, maybe it's time to up your game. And it's easy to get up-to-date on all the exciting new tools the language offers.

Check out the HTML Cheat Sheet. It allows you to browse all the HTML tags either alphabetically or categorically. You can even download it in PDF form and print it.